5 pics of family for C&C

[spudgunr]

I've got five pictures, please post comments and suggestions. There are two of my wife, one of me and my son, and then two of just my son. They were shot in various lighting conditions so they do not look uniform color wise by any means.

 

[Iron Flatline]

A few comments:

The name, date, copyright mark and imperative not to reproduce is superfluous. No one is going to steal these pictures - and if you are that concerned then put the writing across the faces... putting them in a discrete corner simply means they'd get cropped if someone thought these pictures were of commercial value.

The first one is a good shot - a straight-forward portrait with good composition. It could benefit from some soft fill light, but the on-camera flash will have to do for now.

The second one is cute. She ought to sit up straighter (your wife will be hugely grateful if you spend some time learning to direct poses... she doesn't know that yet, but she will.) A lower angle might be better, too. Get down to her eye height and shoot.

The third is a cute papa-son picture. As a stickler I'd like to see you feet in the shot.

I like the fourth and fifth, though that last one needs a little longer exposure - it's a little dark.

 

[Photoadder]

Child photos are awesome!

 

[spudgunr]

Iron, thank you for the comments. I just threw the name on there since I was posting these on facebook as well and I didn't want something nasty across the middle. I'm getting photoshop elemnts soon so I'll put my name more across the middle, but halfway transparent. I know nobody is going to steal THESE particular pictures, but I already had irfanview set up to do that when I bulk resized and I had some funny pics that I had posted elsewhere.

The child ones are dark because it wasnt terribly bright in my living room and I was trying natural light (ISO 200 to prevent them from being terribly noisy, and f/1.8). On my later shots I started using the flash a bit, but on those it was just natural light. I was already at 1/60th or so and my son does not sit still for more than a split second. At 1/30th of a second most of the pics were a bit blurry because of his movement. I did have them a bit TOO dark, I agree. For some reason when I set the exposure to -1/3 and even -1 EV the pictures actually turned out way brighter than the room. I over compensated (by under compensating) to around -2 ev and then later changed it to -1.7. Looks like these two in particular should have been around -1 or -1.3. I wish my nikon d60 had exposure bracketing, in tricky lighting like I was in it would have been useful.

On posing, I'm not all that creative and don't have that many ideas yet :-\ On positioning though there wasn't much we could do in that particular instance. My son was on my back in a backpack and those rocks were 3-4 feet below the walkway, she had to climb over the rail to get there in the first place ;-)